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Monthly Archives: August 2016

A brief history of Pixelhaus: in websites

As we launch this, our latest Pixelhaus website, we thought it might be fun to go back and look at some of our earlier efforts. Pixelhaus was originally formed in 1993 by Richard Gosler, our current creative director. As he was a catalogue and commercial photographer the company was exclusively a photographic studio and the world wide web was literally 2 years old.

First efforts

Our first site for Richard Gosler Photography as we were known then was built in 1998 as an experiment just to see how easy or hard this new fangled technology was. As it goes, very easy as you were generally limited to static sites back then. Our first site was made in Microsoft Frontpage in a weekend. By today’s standards an abomination of code and design but it did the job. Alas we cannot show you what it looked like (which, to be honest is a bit of a relief to us also). But it did allow us to start offering the service to our photographic clientele.

Gosler New Media (1999)

Gosler New Media

In 1999 the company changed names to Gosler New Media to reflect the rapid changes in technology and also our offering. As well as web design, we were one of the first companies in the area to offer 360 degree panoramas, virtual tours and object movies.
Technologies then were largely proprietary such as Apple’s QTVR for cylindrical and cubic panoramas and the notorious IPIX for spherical panoramas.
IBM curiously had their own suite of java based multimedia plugins called Hot Media which were not only fantastic but free. Alas they are no more.

Pixelhaus Studios (2003)

Pixelhaus

In 2003 yet another name change to Pixelhaus Studios. As design was becoming more important to us as a company we wanted to reflect that and the name is a combination of pixel to represent the digital media we worked with and haus which is our homage to the famous Weimar Bauhaus, probably the most influential design school of the 20th century.
The site was also multilingual being available in French and German versions.

Pixelhaus Studios (2007)

Let’s get serious

2006 saw our next major revision and the site you see here is also online as a legacy document under www.pixelhaus-studios.co.uk. By this time we were using content management systems for much of our work and a Canadian company took it upon themselves to steal our design and offer it as a template for CMS Made Simple (CMSMS).
When it became apparent that this was the case they received a torrent of abuse from the CMSMS community but we took it as a homage to our superior design skills! When we moved onto the next version of Pixelhaus we released a free version of the template for anyone to use which went on to be one of their top ten most popular with over 4000 downloads.

Silverstripe

Which brings us almost up to date with the previous version of our site which you can see at the top of the page. This was built in Silverstripe, an award winning Content Management System from New Zealand. The site has done well lasting us 4 years but with the changes in the way people use the internet we had to go responsive, especially as we’re always telling our clients they have to.